Desperately Lonely
by karebear
Summary: A "Meanwhile, in Denerim..." companion piece to Say It Anyway


"My son is sleeping!"

Matty has to concentrate on not squirming when he hears his mother's urgent hiss. His first instinct is to roll over and tell her that she's wrong, but he _knows_ that would be the wrong thing to do. Instead, he pulls his blanket up over his head and burrows his head into his pillow and counts how long he can keep his eyes closed.

"No, 'm not," he says, inside his head. Because no one else is listening.

He listens instead. He listens for quiet, but what he hears instead is everything but: it sounds like his mom is crying and that makes his stomach hurt and his heart starts beating really fast, like it does when he's running. He knows it isn't _real _crying; it's good crying, or at least normal. He forgets to remember to keep his eyes closed, but the blanket is still over his head, so that's okay. He listens to moaning and grunting, panting and whining, yelling, and lots of cursing, but not the angry kind. He listens in case anyone is getting hurt, but he does not think anyone is. Not this time.

He very cautiously peeks through a hole he stretches in the knit fabric of the blanket. In the dark he can't see anything but shadows and shapes and outlines. He watches the shape of a man standing up and stumbling out of the room. He almost falls down, and Matt has to bite his lip so that he doesn't laugh, even though he doesn't really think it's funny. He knows the man is drunk. Most of them are. He listens to the footsteps go away.

He flops over onto his stomach, forgetting for a moment as he does so that his movement will mean Leah will know he's not asleep. Oh well. She probably knows anyway. He flicks his fingernail against his mattress, listening to the soft smacks of impact, so quiet they could barely be heard except that he's listening. He listens to his mother not sleeping.

She sits up, staying very still and quiet. He sees it out of the corner of his eye. Finally, after what seems like a very long time, she sighs. "Come here, Matty."

He frowns, but she doesn't sound mad at him. She sounds a little bit sad. Maybe she _was _for real crying.

He rolls off of his mattress and pads over to her with carefully quiet, gentle footsteps. He shivers in the sudden cold. He's not wearing anything – she isn't either - and he climbs onto her bed. The moonlight spills in through the faraway window. She wraps her arms around him, holding him close. "I love you," she whispers.

"I know."

Leah frowns, because her boy's words sound... uncertain. He's saying what she wants to hear. He doesn't believe it. She knows what a dead-voiced lie sounds like, and it breaks her heart that he has already learned how to repeat such words, stripped of all meaning. She exhales slowly as her son pulls himself out of her arms. What, did she think he'd be a child forever? That her life was any kind of life for a boy to grow up with?

Matt narrows his eyes and watches her guardedly. His eyes flicker toward her face, and his stomach hurts. Because she looks tired, and sad, and hurt. Her eyes are puffy, swelling into what will be a spectacular black eye by the next morning. Left by one of the men who had fucked her violently when he wasn't there to listen.

His fingers curl up into a fist and tears sting his eyes and he barely stops himself from pummeling her, angry that she kicks him out and angry that she won't let him run away forever, he isn't sure which. His shoulder hurts, stabbing pinpricks of pain and a maddening itch. The tattoo inked there a couple of days ago is still healing, and it bothers him more than the actual needles did. Though perhaps that has something to do with the little shotglasses full of liquor the older kids kept handing him as the elf drew the picture into his skin, smacking him whenever he didn't stay still enough.

Leah whipped him pretty well when she saw it, screaming that she'd raised him better than to get caught up in the gangs. He'd just shrugged and told her that obviously she _hadn't_. She'd been furious, more angry at him than she had ever been, and the pain from that belting still lingers too, but he doesn't care about that either. He's pretty sure she felt worse about it than he did, and knowing that is the one reason he's sleeping here for the first time in nearly a month. She needs him. He may be only twelve, but he can tell that much.

He reaches out to trace his fingers over her narrow cheekbone, and he bites his lip as he concentrates. He doesn't know how he knows what to do, but he _does _know. He closes his eyes and he... prays. For the power neither of them have, to fix this.

Leah shivers and cries as the cold blue energy trails over her skin. Her heartbeat speeds up. "What do you think you're doing, boy?" she snaps.

Matty ignores the harsh anger in his voice. In truth, he can barely hear her. His head is buzzing, his heartbeat getting faster and faster as he tries to hold back the rushing surge of power he can feel, the song getting louder and louder.

He squeals suddenly, coughing and choking. His mother's fingers are clamped tight around his forearm. His cheek throbs. He raises his free hand to his face, still stinging, marked by her slap. He can't look at her. He pulls his arm out of her grip, without a word.

"Don't you _ever_," she growls. His heart sinks.

"I'm trying to help you!" He tries to yell, but it turns into more of a whiny plea, the kind that makes him sound like a little kid. His cheeks burn. He's ashamed. And still angry. He can help. He knows he can.

"_Don't!_" Matt looks up cautiously, shocked into stillness by the fear in her harsh, one-word command. Her lip twitches, and she sighs. "I can't lose you," she insists.

Panic overtakes her as she is forced to confront what she'd been dreading and fearing for years. Her voice breaks, and Matt ducks his head, feeling more impossibly guilty for trying to heal her than he'd ever felt for disobeying her, or talking back, or any of the dozen times a day he'd deliberately tried to make her mad. She hugs him close, and this time, he does not pull away. He listens to her shuddering breaths, feels the tension in her shivering muscles. She's crying, and he knows that it's his fault. This is the other reason why he didn't want to come home. He isn't sure, now, why he had. He remains frozen as Leah combs her fingers through his tangled hair.

"You are so much like him," she murmurs. It's the truth. His eyes. His attitude. And his magic. She was stupid enough to fuck a fugitive mage, just for a laugh, and now her son will pay the price.

"Mama?"

Matt's voice is cautious, tremulous, barely audible. He hasn't called her that in years. She looks at him, and her heart hurts. She remembers how young he still is, no matter how grown he may pretend to be.

Her thumb traces over that raw tattoo, the same way it had once brushed over the scars marking a desperately lonely mageling, caught between boy and man; young and damaged, and so very afraid. He didn't come to her for sex. Not really. He wanted to talk. Sometimes that's all they did. He'd tell her stories. Fairy tales. Or random snatches of memory, places he'd been. He made the world seem huge, for a girl who had never left the streets of Denerim. He was constantly drawing, pictures of her and for her. And he could always make her laugh, even though his smile never quite chased the haunted shadows from his eyes. Not all of his stories were good; the ones he didn't tell were obvious all the same. The lashes. The nightmares. The way he flinched every single time the Chantry bells tolled their song over the city.

She hadn't loved him. No, of course not. But she remembers him. And maybe, just maybe, she misses him. Of all the men she'd ever spread her legs for, he is probably the only one who made her feel like it mattered. He is for sure the only one she imagines might want to come back, if he could. "I liked your father more than any of them," she whispers, into their son's ear.

Matty looks up at her, shock and confusion warring on his features. "You said you didn't know or care who my father was," he accuses, careful to launch her exact words back at her. Her smart, smart-assed little boy. _Their_ boy.

She sighs, studying Matty as someone closer to becoming a man than she's ever been willing to admit. She begins to treat him the way he's tried for years to insist on being treated. "What would be the point, Matthias? He's not coming back."

"Oh," he says simply. He can't hide the disappointment in his tone, though he also doesn't bother pretending he'd ever thought otherwise. He has always been a practical child, calculating and cautious, but always one to endlessly point out _how things are_. He never had tolerated maybe's, half-answers and what-if's.

"It's not his fault," she reminds her son gently. She reminds _herself_. "He was an apostate."

"So he's dead."

It isn't a question. She's never had the energy to hide her son from the truth of what happens to mages in this world. They die at the end of a hangman's rope same as the thieves and criminals she _has _tried (and failed), to keep him away from. She has spent every moment of his lifetime desperately fighting the fear that Matt will face the same fate.

"Yeah," she's forced to admit. "Probably."


End file.
